Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we — I say we because we are a team — would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican party?

(I keep hearing this phrase – this occurs almost every time because the voter base natural increases because the number of people in the nation increases, in fact currently the younger vote outnumbers the older vote, which is new – so what – obviously his percentage of the registered voters did not increase or they would say that…and more people voted against him than any candidate in GOP primary history, they’re forgetting that little fact too…

Like this:

While there have been many sad days, especially in recent months, this is the day where yet another once respectable bastion of conservative principles has knelt before the whims of his party and stood behind Donald Trump. About a week after Marco Rubio made this regrettable decision, Paul Ryan has joined him. Both men have stated similar reasons for doing so: “preserving the unity of the party.” Such loyalty might oft be considered noble, but not in such a time as this.

Trump’s deplorable ideology has not changed, and in many cases has only gotten worse. The damage he will bring to the party and to the country will verge on being a irreparable. I understand the desire Mr. Ryan and Mr. Rubio have to preserve the party that once stood for human rights and outstanding economic principles…

Like this:

Welcome to Election Hell. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Keep your hands and feet in the vehicle at all times. If you fail to do so, the rabid animals surrounding the minibus will gnaw on your limbs. Don’t try to feed them, and don’t play apologist for the zombie-like Trump supporters hunched over the carcass of the GOP with dead eyes, nibbling on its liver.

“They just got caught up in the movement.”

Jonestown got caught up in themovement, too.

While people like myself are watching our former knights kneel before the throne of an ego driven self-promoted demigod, we’ve found a few glimpses of hope in the words of individuals like Ben Sasse:

I’ve ignored my phone most of today, but the voicemail is overflowing with party bosses and politicos telling me that “although Trump is terrible,” we “have to” support him, “because the only choice is Trump or…

Like this:

It has become clear that the nation has a lot of idiots and a lot of lunatics. Far too many in fact. I think it’s safe to say that sane intelligent people are the minority. But worse is that the dim and loons are so fragmented that they will never get along with each other. Sadly the only choice is to carve up the nation into different factions. Nothing less will do if we want to avoid the bloody business of civil war (who are we kidding even carving it up will still lead to some war, but we’ll get to that later).

I think due to the myriad of candidates we have had it’s fair to say that we can judge exactly which groups there are out there and each head of these groups will be the new chief executive of each new nation.

I propose a distribution that follows the following map (we can of course do some swaps of individual counties but these more or less follow the population distribution of support for each given candidate).
The new nations and their chief executives are as follows

People’s Republic of New England–Premier Bernie Sanders
The Trump Empire–The Divine Emperor Donald Trump
Progressivania–Prime Minister Hillary Clinton
The Confederate States of ‘Murica–Pres Ted Cruz
The Neoconservative States of America–President Marco Rubio
Lower Canada–Best Bud John Kasich
The Anarchic States of Fuck You–First Citizen Rand Paul (let’s be honest “libertarians” are a fairly anti-social bunch and would want to make it clear that non-libertarians are not welcome)

Now this break down does a few things. It gives everyone access to a major water way to everyone. It protects all the xenophobics from having to touch those evil, evil brown people. It keeps Trump in the traditional home of racism. It keeps the neoconservatives with access to both oceans as they the only ones who will actually want to defend the oceans. Granted the NCSA has more oil but it has less infrastructure and farmland. The Trump Empire and CSM more factories and infrastructure but their economic policies will solve that shortly. PRNE has more rich white liberals, but they’ll move when they have to live through what they advocate (or at least try to). The ASFU is colder and doesn’t have much, but the residents will be too stoned to care (not that everyone there will be a drug addict but the contact high alone will effect everyone).

So the only thing that’s really to divvy up is military infrastructure. I think Air Force, Army, and Marines can be equally divided up, but Trump, PRNE and ASFU should not have a Navy (libertarians have no use for it, Trump and PRNE wants nothing to do with those dirty foreigners, not to mention I think we all fear they would want to spread their evil). Progressivania, The CSM, and Lower Canada can each have one carrier group to defend themselves and still feel relevant, the other 7 groups will go to the NCSA as they’re the only one who will want to use it for the defense of liberty around the world. Nuclear weapons will be divided in similar fashion (we can all agree the commies and fascists can’t be allowed to have nukes, if the libertarians want some they can have them some, but they won’t.)

Two years will be given for everyone to move to the state they want…most of the nation’s people won’t bother because most of the nation thinks politics is pointless and has no effect on their lives…they will soon learn the error of that mistake.

So let’s talk about the changes to structure of the Constitution and policies each government will put in place.

The Anarchic States
The Anarchic states will at first change their Constitution to guarantee private property rights to such a degree that even Adam Smith and Milton Friedman would be worried. Of course they will also abolish all forms of patents and copyrights as modern libertarians hate those things…drugs being legal is a given.

Initially there will be boom of economics followed by a crash as no major companies will actually want to stay in a place where their copyrights and patents aren’t protected (and few foreign trading partners will want to have anything to do with them either with such little protection for IP beyond the sale of basic goods). Further as there will be no bureaucracy to register property or marriage or anything like that the Anarchic states will soon find their economy looking like former Soviet Bloc nations that had similar lack of government infrastructure. Initially the residents will not notice as they’ll be too high (either by choice or the contact high) but as the place stops looking like a frat on an early Friday night and starts looking more and more like a used crack den what little economy is left will disappear.

A few of the more intelligent libertarians will pragmatically realize they’ve gone too far and some government needs to be put in place but the rest of the body politic will be too stoned to care and the intelligent will try and move to Lower Canada, Murica or the NCSA.

People’s Republic of New England
The Constitutional protection for private property will of course be abolished…but will be replaced with a right to free healthcare, free education for however many graduate degrees in things like feminist basket weaving and privilege studies you could wish, free housing, guaranteed employment if you want it but a living wage no matter what, guaranteed 20 weeks vacation, guaranteed medical leave, parental leave, leave for days when you just don’t feel like it, and a constitutional guarantee that you will be loved.

Of course a welfare state that would make Mao think it was a little crazy will be immediately put in place.

This will of course lead to complete and total economic collapse that will make Venezuela look like a vacation resort.

Like most virulently socialist regimes they’ll soon try to compensate for this loss of income by invading other nations. But as the libertarians to the North and the fascists to the West will be too gun happy they’ll of course turn to the only nation that doesn’t pose a major threat…Canada. But even Trudeau will be able to turn them around. Thus the People’s Republic will collapse.

The Trump Empire
Here the great Emperor will at first model the new government off of Rome making himself with only one Senate (all members appointed by him) himself a member of the Senate, the executive, the judiciary, the head of the church and the Commander-in-Chief.
There will be nothing else.
Borders will be closed. Foreign trade will be abolished.
Deportation squads in shiny white uniforms will be created.
Soon the Senate will be abolished and control handed over to regional governors…fear will keep the people in line.

The minorities who supported Trump will soon regret that choice as they will find themselves the workforce of Trump Empire…whether they want to be or not.
Trump will of course pronounce an early victory in stating he has eliminated all Jews from the Empire…because none of them were dumb enough to stay (fool me once shame on you, fool me twice).

Economic output will at first be very high (slave labor is cheap and effective if you’re evil enough to use it)…but of course there will be flaws after a few years, and the Empire will need breathing room. And while Murica will initially be too well defended, the People’s Republic, the Anarchic States and Quebec will soon fall (mainly because even Canada won’t mind too much that the damn French get taken out). But soon they will turn their eyes on…

Lower Canada
Lower Canada will pretty much run thing like they’re going now in the USA. There will be increase to welfare spending, and they will continue the slow death spiral (halted only very slightly by the fact that they will have no foreign military budget to speak of…but most of that will be taken out by the increase in worthless foreign aid that thinks the answer is just throw money at the problem).

They will be invaded by the Trump Empire within about 7 years however and while putting up a valiant 5 minute struggle, like the French before them. They will fall.

This will of course present a problem for…

The Confederate States of ‘Murica
Initially the Confederate states will grant more power to the states, the power for states to veto laws, the power for the Senate to review executive orders, stronger controls on the executive branch, reaffirming of property and individual rights and a lot of other good things. However, because of the Judiciary, because you just can’t trust those activist judges, will be gutted of power the powers to interpret law will actually move to the executive branch in charge of implementing those laws as no other branch with the power to interpret law will be there to stop them. Also as term limits will be put in, as has been seen in every Republic with strong limits on the legislature, the executive branch will benefit and gather even more power. Initially this will not be a problem…and were it not for the Trump Empire then ‘Murica could probably have seen something like the economic boom of the 90’s again lasting maybe even two decades.

But as they have created a recipe for an executive that cannot by checked by the other branches…like the other Confederacy in time of crisis it will turn quickly into a tyranny and in the face of war all liberties will be suspended in defense against the Trump Empire. You might have thought this was building up to WWIII…it’s not.

The fact is that these first nations were all so isolationist that no one in the world would be their allies so it would remain a matter within their own borders. And the weakness presented by the slugfest of a war between them would provide ISIS and the rest of the Islamofascists in the world the perfect weakness to come and attack so being the magnet that draws the poison out of the rest of the world isn’t going to piss off anybody else either. It will be a new Syria…and this time turnabout will be fair play and nobody is going to take refugees from this conflict.

About 15 years after the nation is split apart these two nations will have all but destroyed each other’s populations and most of their infrastructure (although at least Murica will never use nukes against civilian populations.

Not that the fall of Murica is completely the fault of the Trump Empire. As the populist desire to strip government of it’s power will lead inevitably to a dictatorial leader, and the factionalism inherent in populism will lead to social collapse…their death warrant was already signed, Trump just hastened it.

Shifting to the other coast…Progressivania under Hillary Clinton will become like any Western European mildly socialist haven…but without the USA to prop it up it will start falling apart within only a year or so (they’ll also be a tempting target for ISIS and their ilk and won’t have the spine to do anything to stop them)…especially after the refugees from the People’s Republic start streaming in.

They will luckily be temporarily bailed out as with each economic crisis the NCSA will buy up large tracks of land from Progressivania. Which is also what will keep Muria propped up for a while.

You see, The NeoConservative States of America will be just what its name suggests: Neoconservative. The first that will be done is a complete capitalist overhaul of the government. Like Murica you will have strengthening of property and states rights, a lowering of bureaucracy and taxation, and a restoration of checks on the branches of government…unlike Murica you won’t have a disregard to the balance part of checks and balances and the three branches will be more co-equal (but with the most power in the legislature) again not set up to favor the executive. You will likely see Senators return to being elected by states not the public and a slow deliberate legislation process will return to America.

Also the NCSA gets the land bordering Mexico because unlike every other nation here, they won’t be xenophobes and will actually welcome immigrants from the world over. This along with the capitalistic reforms that will almost immediately come out of the federal government will produce a Renaissance in innovation and economics that will make what were once the least populated states in the union an economic super power that will laugh at China.

Unlike most of the other nations which will torment and possibly execute what are now illegal aliens, the NCSA will offer them a path to citizenship at the price of four years of military service (thus solving the man power problem that would come in in trying to keep up the previous US commitments worldwide that only the NCSA will be concerned with honoring)…though this man power shortage will be short lived as economic super powers always drawn legal immigrants who want to be a part of the nation and culture that rewards skill and genius. And not hating people who are different the NCSA will welcome them.
Not being hindered by the populists, fascists, and isolationists, long term foreign policy will be enacted and Marshall Plan like rebuilding programs will be put in place that will make our current deployments stable and drive back ISIS (they’ll survive for a while only because they’ll have so many new targets with such idiotic leaders). With the massive revenue that will be coming in (despite low income taxes and no corporate, capital gains, death or VAT taxes or tariffs) they’ll be more than willing to buy up land from the failing nations around it…first the eastern portion of California and the Pacific Northwest, then the California central valley…then probably Alaska and Hawaii…

The Trump Empire will foolishly try to invade (big mistake) and the fascists will first be route out of Lower Canada (which will be annexed…only makes sense as most of the inhabitants will have been slaughtered in the Trump labor camps) and then having had enough of this crap will take back the all the other land that the Empire once held…this time not making the mistake of FDR and Trump and making sure that not a single Nazi is left to return.

Murica, in true Texas fashion, finding it cannot stand on it’s own, will offer to be annexed by the only adult in sight.

Finally Progressivania having become an third world nation will collapse and the NSCA will take over in a humanitarian effort to stem the suffering…at this point they’ll return to their proper name, the United States of America…sans a bunch of idiots.

What makes this an April Fool’s day post? The fact that everything I just said is more rational than the freak show we currently have going on. And that is either a cosmic joke or just sad.

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome.”—Nietzsche

We’re only a couple weeks away from the movie I have been waiting for: Dawn of Justice (you’ll notice I refuse to use the more sophomoric title that was clearly the brain child of an idiot studio executive *

This film is the extension of the brain child of producer Christopher Nolan and director Zach Snyder. Christopher Nolan uses classic literature as the backdrop for all of his movies (Batman Begins is The Aeneid, Prestige–Faust, Dark Knight–Othello, Inception–Theseus in the Labyrinth, Dark Knight Rises–A Tale of Two Cities, Interstellar–Odyssey). Snyder has a long habit of tacking on heavy philosophy as well (the speeches in 300 are better than any of the action, is not what you’d call shallow, and even his worst film Sucker Punch was clearly trying to be something more than pointless action—it failed miserably—but there was a clear attempt, I have no idea exactly what he was attempting but he was trying to do something more there.)

Now Nolan is probably not going to be involved in the entire DC universe, but he did help Snyder chart the entire universe for the first round of films…and with charting the plots I am really hoping against hope that he outlined the themes of all the movies and they all deal with the same philosophical grounds that Man of Steel did.

I expect to see Suicide Squad tear Foucault a new one, Wonder Woman glorify 2nd Wave Feminism while destroying 3rd Wave Feminism, Justice League Part 1 to destroy Kant and Part 2 to glorify Aristotle (this is pure speculation)…but I am fairly certain that Dawn of Justice will tear the abhorrent beliefs of Friedrich Nietzsche (laughingly called philosophy) to shreds.

What do I mean?
Well first let’s go through a crash course of Nietzsche’s insanity. Now Nietzsche is very quotable, because he put nothing in context, and you can probably find a line to justify anything but traditional religion. Some of it even sounds quite profound (again when taken out of context) but when you take it as a whole it’s a poor and rambling attempt to justify sociopathic behavior. It’s hard to deal with a man who claims at one moment to love self-reflection and then decry reason and rationality as a perversion of humanity the next. Once you’ve actively denied logic, it becomes impossible to challenge you because like a child your interlocutor just says that they don’t care about that, facts and reason aren’t relevant, they have something better, who the hell knows what that is (it’s like arguing with a Trump supporter). Nietzsche’s ethics are just as bad, hyping the Übermensch:

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape… The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth… Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.—Thus Spoke Zarathustra

While the nature of this overman, like most things in Nietzsche, hard to nail down because Friedrich was committed to an asylum a couple decades later than he should have been, it is clear that the übermensch is not bound by the slave-morality of “good and evil,” to be something superior to the common people, making his own values, free of all traces of empathy, and above the rabble, to do with them and the world as he pleases.

With as abhorrent a vision as this, it is no shock that Nietzsche’s ideas were so easily used by the Nazis (even though he personally did not support such nationalist views while he was alive), and was the subject of condemnation in an early comic which portrayed one of the overmen as a cruel dictator worthy of all the scorn ethical people would put on what Nietzsche viewed as an ideal. That comic was of course “The Reign of the Superman” by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Who quickly realized that the way to truly destroy the values of Nietzsche wasn’t to show how a fascist example of the master race in all its abhorrence, but to show the superiority of ethics in a Superman who was above the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And this is why Nietzsche had to be the target of this addition to the Superman franchise, because the entire comic began as an attack on Nietzschian values.

So how will this play out in the film.

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”—Nietzsche

“That’s how it starts. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men… cruel.”—Alfred Pennyworth

Possibly the only part of Nietzsche that will not be lambasted is the oft quoted warning about staring into the abyss as this is pretty much where Batman is clearly going to begin this film. His hopeless view that Superman can’t be trusted because “twenty years in Gotham, Alfred—We’ve seen what promises are worth. How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”

This man has been fighting for so long he doesn’t believe any one beside himself and Alfred are on the side of good. He sees the worst in everyone. Granted after Dent, Todd, Quinn, and who knows who else is in this universe, he’s seen a lot of people fall to their worst side. He has fought monsters so long that as Alfred warns it “turns good men cruel.”

So if this movie is a refutation of Nietzsche why make one of the most hyped points of trailers the point where Nietzsche is correct? Because it was a tip of the hat to let us know which philosophy they would be dealing with…and because as we all know for all his fighting Bruce isn’t a monster—not now, not ever. And this movie will show that the good can survive the staring contest with the abyss. (Which will probably be also mirrored in Clark’s doubts about his mission that we get hints of.

“In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.”—Nietzsche

“This means something. It’s all some people have. It’s all that gives them hope.”—Lois Lane

Nietzsche was a real downer of a person. And for all his claims to hate nihilism, his ideas were more or less nihilistic.

Now certainly the first movie Man of Steel the concept of hope was dealt with over and over. But we’re going to return to this in this movie and see that, like Nietzsche, people like Luthor find the idea of spreading hope to be a dangerous one…probably because it ruins their ability to control. And we will almost certainly see that the idea of hope is what is going to take Batman out of the abyss and back toward the character out to give people a symbol that we saw in the last time Nolan had his hands on the character.

“God is Dead”—Nietzsche

“If Man won’t kill God, the Devil will do it.”—Lex Luthor

Nietzsche, Luthor, Zod, and Darkseid (whom we are getting hints of) all believe themselves to be above others, above any concept, laws and judges unto themselves. They don’t need Gods to give purpose to existence, they just find their own glorification of power to be the purpose.

But our heroes will show, maybe not in terms of divinity, but a higher concept is still needed to offer a course and goal for humanity…otherwise it wouldn’t be called Dawn of Justice.

“Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great, that belongs to greatness.”—Nietzsche

“What have you done?”—Superman

If this Nietzsche quote isn’t an actual recipe for how to create Doomsday I don’t know what is. And when that monster (I’ll admit I too hope what we saw in the trailer wasn’t the final CGI vision of the monster) is destroyed by DC trinity, it will go a long way to show this glorification of infliction of pain is flawed.

“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”—Nietzsche

With all the discussion from Luthor and corrupt Senators (at least I assume she’s corrupt as she’s with Luthor a lot) about power and it’s use, one can’t help but hear a disunion of the will to power coming into this movie somewhere. And while I think he championing of the Aristotelian virtues is still a couple movies away, I get the feeling that this film will deal with how power is only a tool to be used for virtue or vice and is in itself not the central point of life or ethics.

“When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever known a woman like me.”–Wonder Woman

And I can’t help but point out that if you read Nietzsche you may find claims of his anti-Semitism are not as simple as pop culture would have you believe…but his unspeakable misogyny more than makes up for any perceived points by not being a complete Nazi returning Friedrich and his ideas to the category of “complete waste of space and volume.”
And what, to point out the obvious, what better way to put the final nail in the coffin of Nietzsche’s ideas, than to show how wrong his hatred of women as “the weaker sex” with not only a version of Lois Lane who is finally able to figure out who Superman is, but the most bad ass super-heroine in existence.

Granted all of this is based off what we know of Nolan, Snyder, and the few hints from the trailers…but this is what you should go in looking for, as this director and producer have no intention of showing anything so mundane as a overpowered beatdown.

Let me state up front that I don’t care if Trump comes to the GOP convention with 80% of the delegates. The rules have to be changed so that he loses. He cannot be allowed to be the nominee of the Republican Party.

Let me explain why.

Some believe that we need to save the GOP by making the sure the party stays together with idiotic headlines like…

I hate to tell you this but the coalition of the current Republican party is not staying together. Conservatives who backed Walker and Rubio, Populists who backed Cruz, Fiorina, and Carson, and somehow we’ve acquired a bunch of fascists who are backing Trump. This group can’t stay together. Some people are not only going to leave—THEY HAVE TO LEAVE.

Wanting to keep this screwball coalition together is more of a problem than Trump ever could be, because even if…

Like this:

Yesterday was Super Tuesday and, oh boy, did it not live up to its name. I think the words “should drop out” saw more action in one 24 hour span than Jack Bauer saw in 8.5 seasons. Everyone stood around poking what they assumed was the dead carcass of The Republic proclaiming, “What did you do?!”

Fingers were pointed, accusations made, and every candidate left has absolutely no viable path to the White House, or so I’ve heard. Some are right, some are really, really, really wrong, and others are over in the corner with a yo-yo trying to figure what makes it go up and down; we’ll call them “Ben Carson’s remaining supporters.”

I’m going to agree with some of you, chastise others, and give my own analysis of the situation.

Like this:

A government professor of mine once stated that all governments were a balance between three different values: Equality, Order, and Liberty. No one value can be pursued without cost to the other two. The ideal society would actually be the one that keeps these three points in balance. However, as we look around modern parties and political movements, the logic of balance seems nowhere to be found.

Individual have the 4 cardinal virtues: Temperance, Moderation, Justice, Fortitude…but these are the basis for the three political virtues: liberty, equality, order. They all have to work together or not at all.

Liberals, socialists and progressives seek equality at the cost of order and liberty finally reaching their ideal society, a Communistic state where everyone is equal but in the end utterly worthless as equality requires none be higher than others, thus all talent, all incentives, and all goals have been destroyed leaving society to collapse before the equally unimpressive slaves that it has created. In a state where all are equal there can be no order because power cannot be vested (even through law) in another thus nothing can keep law and civil society together thus at best everything is merely slave to the whim of the herd (law by the same methods created reality TV)…and there can be no liberty, as liberty leads to exceptionalism, and no one can be better than anyone else

The growing fascist movements of Greece, the tyranny of Vladimir Putin, and the vile wretchedness of Islamofascism, value order above all else. But for there to be complete order there can be no liberty because if people can choose for themselves, they will sometimes choose wrong and this inevitably leads to some level of chaos, some crime, some disorder. And in the ordered state there can be no equality, as equality requires that all are subject to rules, and for the ordered state to work no one can watch the watchers because they are the final authority, otherwise there is no way to control and maintain order.

Libertarians and anarchists view liberty as the end all be all of all politics. But where there is perfect freedom there can be no equality, even before the law, because there can be no law if there is nothing but license to do whatever you want. And there can be no order in the fully liberated state as the law who would hold back those who do not recognize the rights of others cannot exist.

And finally populists don’t particularly view any of these as all that important. Yes populists want equality when someone is doing better than them, which is why businesses and businessmen are evil and need to be reined in…but they strangely don’t care about equality when they’re doing better, which is why even Ron Paul brought back millions in pork to his district. They care about liberty, for themselves…but for anyone else, eh, it’s not that important. And order is important, so long as it’s in my general vicinity, enforced by me, and I don’t care if it’s not in my line of sight. (And please understand why I have been hitting the populists posing as conservatives a lot lately, your average Democratic voter has always been a populist. Their activists and politicians maybe progressives, but the voters are populists who just care about their entitlements and what will be given to them). Here regrettably, is the rather large body of people whom Trump and Cruz pander to.

Meanwhile there is the real conservative viewpoint. That these three virtues of a society must be held in careful balance. That the extreme of any one of these because a dystopian nightmare (Liberty, Order, Equality…Lord of the Flies, 1984, Harrison Bergeron…or for the less well read, Mad Max, Hunger Games, Divergent…or if you prefer history, Somalia, Nazi Germany, Revolutionary France). That a society without these three to guide them is just as bad as one where only one is followed (I’d give an example but modern politics seems to be it and the last few years of Rome seem to be the only places dumb enough to try such an abhorrent idea in practice). Only the society that balances these forces is a prosperous one.

So what is the guiding star of conservatism that makes it so different from these other ideologies? Well, not to sound like a dozen other blogs on this site but the answer is once again, Aristotle.

Aristotle, for all his flawed understanding of politics (give the man a break, there wasn’t much reliable history to work with in the 4th century B.C. and you can’t expect him to have prescience of what was to come), understood that in politics, as with ethics, it is not a question of ends OR means, but a question of ends AND means. Those who value equality or order only value an end of making everyone equal or making everything peaceful. Those who value liberty only value the means of liberty not the result of what such anarchy brings. Only balancing both ends and means work.

And Aristotle saw the correct end to focus on. The end to all human life is Happiness. And society, family, education must all be structured to ensure Happiness for the greatest number of people. Now because Happiness requires freedom of choice and personal growth, not everyone will reach happiness no matter what a government/family/society does, but it requires liberty and the ability to exercise free will. But because Happiness requires some ability to plan and control your own life, it requires order to some degree. And because the point is to provide Happiness (or the opportunity to pursue Happiness) for the most people as all are equally human and equally deserving at birth of achieving Happiness. None of these on their own can lead to Happiness, and all must work together.

And this is why other belief systems don’t work; they’re not aimed at Happiness.

For instance look at misnamed “social conservatives” (Progressives for Jesus might be a better way to put it). They keep saying that the point of marriage is to have children. As if having children is an end in itself. And they keep bringing this up as a reason why they opposed gay marriage. Now there are good reasons to get rid of marriage as a legal concept (and replace it with legal civil unions and let religion handle marriage without government interference) but it is not just the Progressive mentality here to have the government take control of everything. It is the missed sense of what the end of things are. They view the family as a means to creating another family. The family, society, everything in the view has no purpose but to serve itself. You have to have marriage to create children. You have to raise children so they lead lives where they get married. They get married to have children…over and over again. There is no point to the individual life (unless you want to get into some bizarre servitude to God, which views God as a master and the individual the slave…but no serious reading of any sane religion even comes close to that.) This is why social conservatives tend to be not only bad at politics but their own religion. Social conservatives should go back and read their Aquinas who makes it clear that “the principal end of matrimony, namely the good of the offspring” and that “the secondary end of matrimony, which is the mutual services which married persons render one another in household matters.” Notice how in the second point it is the betterment of each other (i.e. the individual’s happiness) that is the point of marriage. Just as every social institution is supposed to place the Happiness of the individual as a goal. Parents should be concerned with teaching their children the knowledge, ethics, and character that will allow them to be happy adults. Schools and other societal organizations should be focused on encouraging people to be the best they can be with the goal being individual Happiness. Social conservatives’ problem, like all progressives, is they think society is the end goal, it is not; the good of individual is the goal.

Then you have Libertarians who don’t even consider ends and just, like good Kantian idiots, look at means. And liberty is the only mean they care about. Oh they may say that freedom leads to individual Happiness, but they ignore that just because the exercise of free will is necessary it is not sufficient. (Just as Milton Friedman said that “History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”) Let’s take a look at what sometimes appears to be the only thing that libertarians think about: The War on Drugs. Okay, I will concede that the War on Drugs has been handled idiotically. I will concede that if a person should be able to use drugs in the privacy of their own home if they’re not hurting anyone. I concede that the power to prosecute the War on Drugs has led to massive costs and an intolerable level of corruption in the name of the War on Drugs. But in all this the libertarians fail to admit some very simple things. They act like the people who take drugs are all just innocent little lambs who are the victims of an unjust police power.

Oh, look it would appear that as incarceration went up crime went down…shocker.

Let me set the record straight: They’re criminals (whether they get caught and convicted or not, they’re criminals). They have the mentality that the rules of society, their long term well-being, and how their actions may hurt others are of absolutely no concern to them so long as they get a moment of pleasure. At best that is vilely hedonistic, at worst it has a bit of a sociopath in it. Libertarians like to pretend that you have otherwise innocent drug users in one group, and in another you have real criminals. And that the fact that we have a massive prison population proves that this War on Drugs needs to end. The problem is that you don’t have two different groups; you have a Venn diagram where criminals and drug users are often one in the same. Libertarians like to point to the increasing prison population, but they always conveniently forget that as prison populations go up violent and non-violent crime go down. They ignore that often drugs are used to put dangerous criminals away when other more serious charges don’t have as much admissible evidence. So there are benefits to the War on Drugs. But not willing to admit that drops in the murder, rape, theft rates is a good thing, libertarians only care about the liberty to do drugs. They don’t advocate that we should focus more on the cartels, the gang distributors, and legalize personal home use (all things which would still probably round up the worst real criminals while not hurt the people who can actually handle personal use)…no they have to argue that we should just legalize all drugs. No concern for order, just liberty’s most perverse form, license…and no Happiness for anyone.

The other difference between libertarians, Progressive for Jesus**, and real conservatives. Unlike Libertarians, conservatives understand that laws do need to be structured not just to protect rights but to encourage habits that will typically lead to a healthy society and Happiness in individuals (for instance unless we switch to a flat tax having tax credit for charity; the fact that we can’t just get rid of civil union side of marriage, and that we do need a safety net of some kind***; providing minimum standards for education to make sure all students receive a basic minimum of education) but unlike the Progressive for Jesus we must do so in a way that limits (or at least poses as few limits as possible) to the good that liberty provides (deciding what counts as a marriage and what doesn’t, when gay marriage provides the same benefits; spending money and resources checking on what people do in private that hurts no one; dictating what to include content wise in education; etc.).

Being consistently conservative is difficult. It requires balancing numerous issues of the needs of individuals, the long term good of society, Liberty, Order, Equality. And it’s a constantly shifting point because what creates that balance in one era may be totally unbalanced in another. Proper government needs to be directed toward the Happiness of individuals. It needs to balance our needs for liberty, order, and equality. When it does not do these things it creates bad laws. And it is so easy to get lost in caring only about your own want (populists) or one of the political virtues at the expense of the others. Right now we need a lot more liberty, but we cannot forget that it is the balance and the good of society and the individual that is our true goal—not just liberty for the sake of liberty.

Of course none of this is really new…the people who real conservatives look toward as a guide post made it quite clear that liberty, or order (tranquility, defense), or equality (justice, general welfare) were all equal political virtues that had to be held in balance of each other…

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

*Now I know that I have heard some people have claimed that the FBI is merely shading the numbers—that they’re not counting things the same way to make things look better than they are. I’ve heard that claim from LOTS of people. But you know what I find interesting, I can’t find that claim on any think tank. None. Liberal. Conservative. Libertarian. Nobody. You would think that conservatives would have hit Clinton or Obama for skewing the data, or liberals would have hit Bush. But nobody seems to questions the FBI’s stats…nor is there any jump that you would see if you changed the criteria, it’s a slow progression. So either everybody and I mean everybody, is on a massive conspiracy to slowly skew the crime numbers, or crime really has been dropping.

**You thought I wasn’t serious, but I am. I am using that from now on.

***Libertarians, before you yell at me that we need to get rid of welfare entirely, please remember that Friedman and Hayek both said we need a safety net because having people in real poverty (the kind you see in the third world) creates people who seriously have the choice of steal or die, at which point it becomes a need for them to steal and as we all know from the example of Jean Valjean, utterly unjust to punish them.

As many of you are aware, I’m a bookworm, and J. R. R. Tolkien is a god in the literary world. So, of course, he created one of the greatest unifying characters of all time: Aragorn. I’m overwhelmed with great sadness over the fact that Aragorn is unfamiliar to many, and while I’m also rather disheartened that Khan may be a foreign name, as well, I’ll do my best to give a quick synopsis of their characters without going into incredible detail.

Disclosure: No, I’m not saying that Ted Cruz is Khan, nor that Marco Rubio is Aragorn. For example, I don’t think Rubio has killed any Uruk-hai and, quite frankly, I think we can all agree that we don’t want to see Ted Cruz in the bare-chested Wrath of Khan wardrobe. I’m just noting a few similarities in leadership techniques, and bringing some levity to…

Like this:

While the Department of the Interior has been in the news for some fairly ridiculous reasons lately, that does not undermine the fact that it is unquestionably one of the worst uses of government power in D.C. which is actively working every day to keep Americans in poverty and hurt the economy.

Born of an era before we had executive level offices that were not necessarily under a cabinet department, the Department of the Interior was originally conceived of a place to stick all the internal brick-a-brack that didn’t really belong in other departments but were federal government domestic issues. Most of the things originally put in this department (like the Patent office) no longer are in the Department of the Interior. And what is left is utterly useless.

And we need to address this issue first because unlike most of the problems in the Department which boil down to give it to the states or sell it to the private sector and close the offices, this disaster of a longstanding government travesty has more intricacies given how deeply we have screwed over, and more importantly how deeply we are screwing them over this very minute, this one group.

Before you ask, yes we are going to get rid of every bit of this god-awful department, but just closing it isn’t the way to do it.

I propose to the following actions
Every Native American currently getting checks from the government just for existing will get a lump sum check equivalent to ten years worth of payments, this should give them an appropriate buffer to either do things they never were able to do on the dole (like get an education and job skills, which sadly is all to often a story on the Res.) or to invest in their own future even if they are already leading a productive life. As much as I hate welfare you can’t cut people off cold turkey and expect them to thrive…but given the particular evil of this department I don’t trust a slow step down either—so lump sum payment and we’re done with that.

At the same time everyone living on the reservation will get a half acre of land put in their name.

All other reservation land will be given to a corporation in the name of the tribe. Members of the tribe living on the reservation will get 1000 shares, those not living on the reservation but still recognized as members of the tribe get 500 (numbers are of course up for debate, but I understand tribal benefits for many tribes already follow this or similar models). So everyone now has land in their own name and the rest of the land is held by a corporation.
Thus they can now get loans, use the land and houses as collateral, invest, develop and generally work to improve their own lives with all the same rights that all other Americans (seriously it is just disgusting how we do not grant basic property rights to this one group). (And personally I wouldn’t mind giving large plots of other federal land to the reservations to also be included in their corporate holdings, they will almost certainly take care of it and make more money off it than the government ever could). Every reservation will then be incorporated as its own county and thus will only have to deal with state and federal governments. Finally all the casinos will be granted 100 year grandfather clauses from state government interference (I don’t like getting involved in state issues like that, but no need to further screw over the tribes, 100 years is more than enough time to find some other source of income or come to some understanding with the states they reside in). The casinos will of course go to the ownership of the tribe’s corporation.
From there they are free to win or lose based on the laws of free enterprise and capitalism. That much property should be a good head start, but this way from this point forward they would be treated not differently than any other American (seriously how has the government not stopped treating them as second class citizens yet..how was this never part of any Civil Right’s movement?) Then you won’t have moments like the government getting to decide if land the tribe considers sacred will be used for mining ) (although my suspicion is that if they were actually making money from a lease of the land personally, like most rational folk profit is very sacred).

Okay here’s an easy one. Just give the land and responsibilities of these over to the states. I’m fairly certain someone in Phoenix has a better idea of how to take care of the Grand Canyon than someone in D.C. So that goes for every federal park. The f

Yes in California, a place where there is a drought, where serious water rationing is in place, where water is at a premium…the government is forcing people to dump over a trillion gallons of water into the ocean to save a useless fish. I’m sorry but the destruction of billions of dollars in agriculture (and the relating economic benefit) is clearly more important than a damn fish that no one but the US government cares about.

US Geology Survey, Bureau of Land Reclamation, Bureau of Mining Reclamation
If these serve any purpose, which is doubtful, it’s something the states can handle at probably half the price.

Office of Insular Affairs
This office actually does need to be kept around since they’re the management of all those territories we still have (which is a federal issue). But it can go on as an executive office, you don’t need a whole department for it.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
These are the geniuses who told B.P that drilling close to the shore was dangerous and you have to drill further out in the ocean for it to be safe.
Yeah they’re useless.

And finally we get to the problem we’ve been hearing about so often lately

Bureau of Land Management

247.3 million acres.
That’s how much land BLM has. One-eighth of the US.
Most of that land isn’t park land, it’s grazing land, it’s land with resources, it’s land that could be sold either to the states or the private sector for a huge profit (didn’t we have a debt we needed to pay off?)

There is no reason for the government to own any of that! There is barely a reason that states should own this land.This land needs to be sold off. Granted many people depend on this land for their livelihood and I have no problem with offering them to buy the land they have been leasing at whatever the market place for such undeveloped land is…but if they don’t want to buy it the land needs to go up for auction—probably over the course of a few years as putting that much land on the market at once would collapse all prices, but the government does not need to own this land. And not only because there is no reason for the government to own it…but because as with all things, they’re losing money on it. Only the federal government can charge people to use land that just sits there and requires little to no upkeep other than what nature provides or what people will pay you to do and still lose money on it.

We don’t need to get into how unbelievably corrupt and inept and inept the people at BLM are because they shouldn’t exist in the first place. Even if they weren’t mentally challenged sociopaths they still shouldn’t exist so their extensive laundry list of moral and intellectual failings is a moot point (unless you want to throw them all in jail, which I’m okay with, but first sell the land and close the office). As a quick intermediary we can just sell the land to the states, but the federal control has to be ended now.

As the lead Federal agency responsible for the protection and sound development of the nation’s natural resources, the Department of the Interior has a special obligation to be a leader in energy management and conservation. As such, bureaus and offices across the Department are committed to conserving energy and water resources, eliminating waste, increasing renewable energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts by optimizing the use of energy efficient and water conserving technologies. Bureaus and offices are also striving to incorporate energy efficiency, water conservation, and sustainable practices into the decision-making processes during the planning, design, acquisition, renovations, operations and maintenance of buildings. The Office of Acquisition and Property Management (PAM) coordinates these important Department-wide efforts.

And what in the history of the US Government makes you think that they’re in any way competent to do any of that?
Yeah close this boondoggle as well.

So again, we have a terrible organization that needs to have every single one of its responsibilities either privatized, sent to the states or just ended.

Well, here I am, fashionably late. I know you’ve probably read all the GOP debate recaps you can possibly handle, but give me a chance to rock your world… or waste a solid 10 minutes of your life. I wrote a debate recap for another blog earlier today, and I reserved some of my meanest criticism for this post. I’m sure that everyone else who blogs there is probably happy with that choice. However, I’m going to put a little twist on the situation and discuss the entire race as a whole, and mainly note a few things I’m mulling over now that this debate is in the books.

Okay, let’s be honest, this is going to be one giant – albeit fun – rabbit trail.

Why is the federal government in charge of infrastructure? Yes I can see where a federal plan would have been originally required in making sure all the major cities connected to all the major cities and making sure the overall plan made sense. But we have that now. It’s no longer an issue of the headache of getting 50 states to agree to one plan. The plan is already in place. Why is the federal government still in charge?

I mean look at the most obvious example of government control of infrastructure: railroads. Amtrak consistently loses money, consistently has bad service, has no clear plan (for instance why is there an Amtrak station in Flagstaff but not in Phoenix…shouldn’t a state’s capital and the largest city in the state be an Amtrak stop…sixth largest city in the nation and all). And then of course there is that slight problem about Amtrak safety…granted it’s been a few years since the last major crash but that still has not wiped the old jokes about Amtrak from my mind. “Amtrak, where they don’t post the times of arrival, just the odds.” Or of course there was the time the Onion joked that terrorists demand that the US has a better train system because if they bombed it right now no one would believe it was an act of terrorism.

And if they’re so incompetent at running what should be the most cost and time efficient form of travel we expect them to do a better job with the roads and bridges? Are you kidding? These are the people who wanted to build a bridge to nowhere (yeah and you would have to be a bleeding heart of a liberal to be a governor and defend that pathetic excuse for pork). Just look at every high speed rail project out there right now…over budget and not going anywhere, whereas the private sector would love to build these things…but they can’t because the government keeps getting in the way.

How about this?

One, let’s have the government sell all of its shares in Amtrak. We might actually get a decent rail system. Which is actually what I’d like.

Two, I’ve said this before on numerous occasions, but we need national open shop rules. That will cut the costs of most of these operations by at least 50% if not more.

Three, turn all infrastructure repair over to the states (or more local governments).

Four, end the federal tax on gas, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon, but give at least 6 months before it ends so that states can enact laws so that they can collect that same amount (after all if they’re going to be paying for all the infrastructure, they have a right to collect the taxes that are supposed to pay for it).

What will happen? One, you’ll find money will be spent far more efficiently. Having Senators from Hawaii and House members from Vermont vote on infrastructure appropriations for Alaska makes no sense. They don’t know where the actual needs in the system are, they can’t possibly. The country is just too damn big, and no nationwide bureaucracy can either because every division will be arguing its problems are the most needed. But a state is small enough to know (except maybe California and Texas…but you can’t have everything). So instead of pork projects in places no one drives you’ll have the bridges and roads that need work worked on because the people making decisions probably have driven on them.

What is that you say? Well a lot of the states won’t necessarily want to deal with all that sudden new bureaucracy…so what will they do…they’ll hire private companies to turn all the roads into toll roads and maintain their upkeep. Now some of you may have an aversion to that…but there is no reason to. As has been repeatedly shown when private companies take over the upkeep of freeways and highways by making them toll roads they do it for less, they reduce traffic and accidents, they reduce the time it takes to repair and improve roads at a fraction of the cost and you get higher quality roads. And they make a profit. Yes what a shock the government really doesn’t know how to do anything

A complicated chart for a whole lot of waste.

. And if you eventually start turning all freeways, highways and bridges into privately run toll roads…well the interesting thing is the states won’t need their 18.4 cent per gallon tax and they can either reduce tax (eventually) or shore up all those state budgets (which I want in the short run…right now I don’t really want the price of gas to drop as that would be better for the oil rich nations that support terrorism). (Oh and companies would have to make public bids for these roads so it’s simply who is willing to do it if for the cheapest amount…it’s a lot harder to bribe politicians for kickbacks when you’re judged only on a public bid and not protected by mountains of federal bureaucrats).

Then you have some of the smaller parts of the Department, like drug and alcohol compliance…again another thing that should never have been more than a state issue. Dear god kill this entire department.
All in all, the government should just send everything that has to do with infrastructure and transportation to the states and private companies. Remind me again…why do we need the department of Transportation? Sure we’ll need to keep the FAA around (as the 80’s showed, having that as a private sector business where workers could strike would be a terrible idea, at least at present…get some private high speed rail in there as a viable option things might change), but other than that? Whatever issues of transportation that the military needs can probably be handled by a small office out of the DOD. There is no reason to keep this mess of a department around. Privatize or give it to the states, doesn’t matter just so long as the federal department is killed. The only thing that you needed federal control of was setting up the initial planning (and that’s done) and maybe setting some minimum standards for military needs on main highways—nothing else.

Like this:

So this week Obama in his usual way, suggested more pointless regulations against guns…because the so-called Constitutional professor doesn’t seem to grasp the Supreme Court making it quite clear the 2nd Amendment details an individual right that does not come with many exceptions. Granted what Barry proposed was within the letter of the law, even though it is entirely antithetical to the spirit of the law (but that has been the last seven years so many times hasn’t it?). And that’s just not my opinion, those over at the Heritage Foundation seem to agree that while all of these will face still (and usually successful) legal challenges, the proposals themselves are within the letter of the law: